I'm interested in finding potential collaborators (with clinical expertise in muscle diseases) to start a pilot study about the hypothetic effects of some mild diseases (as congenital myotonia: Thomsen's and Becker's) on emotions and affective processing (from an embodied emotion perspective). If you are interested, send me a private message including a brief cv.
Hi,
I find the question very interesting from a theoretical point of view, but I am not sure you would find any (consistent) impairment in emotion and affective processing in a population of subjects with mild congenital disease. Are you interested in studying their recognition abilities of others' emotions, or in their own subjective emotional experience?
Re. emotion recognition, data on another congenital syndrome (Moebius) are controversial (the first patient described by Giannini in 1984 showed a severe impairment in recognising facial expressions, other patients described by Calder et al. in 2008 showed selective impairments that were inconsistent among patients, Bogart found no impairments and concluded that facial mimicry is not necessary to recognize other's emotions), but we found a significant impairment in patients with acquired locked-in syndrome (Pistoia et al., 2010).
Results on congenital syndromes are always difficult to interpret because people with such deficits could have developed different compensating strategies.
Re. affective processing more in general, we found no differences between locked-in patients and controls in a task in which subjects were asked to classify complex scenes on the basis of the emotion they induced. Therefore, it would seem that the motor system is not involved in this kind of "subjective" emotional experience but it is in the recognition of other's emotions, but of course more studies would be needed and I have no data on congenital syndromes.
Very interesting, though. If you go on with the study I would be very interested in knowing your results!
I'm not able to extend myself in further research at present, but I wanted to offer to you the possibility of including Theory of Mind (ToM) as an added possible dimension to your study. I am researching emotional intelligence components including ToM and, though I'm not clear on the criteria of the conditions you're investigating, this might be of some interest.
Fascinating work!
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